prototyping the user experience

March 23, 2009

I had a really amazing and inspiring talk with Shin Shimojo today. His Psychophysics lab at Caltech is doing some ground breaking work on essential aspects of being human. Besides being an extraordinary researcher he's also an artist. His work, exhibited world wide deals with visual perception and illusion. He jokes about neuro-hyper-reality as a way to stimulate our neuro perceptual systems in ways that are more real than reality. A few years ago he recieved a grant to study the neural basis for aesthetics. As part of that project he's been studying the foundations of empathy and has uncovered some interesting facts. He runs this experiment where he asks an experimenter and a subject to point their fingers at each other at close proximity and then measures the micro movements of the two fingers. Alternatively he asks the subject to consciously follow or not follow the experimenter's finger with their own finger. It turns out that when the subject consciously trys NOT to follow the finger their finger infact moves at a micro level in sync with the other finger. After 30 min of consciously following the other finger - the unconscious syncronicity is higher. Based on this study and others he is inclined to believe that empathy is built bottom up. That is- our bodies unconsciously physically mimic each other. So the next logical question is how does that mimicry feel, familiar or novel? Which leads me to another study he did looking at which voice we find the most attractive. It turns out that in his study the voice we find most attractive is our voice transposed to the opposite gender. How self centered of us. What if we are able to design systems to have a deeper more direct expereince of the other? Can being self centered lead us to more empathy? Keep an eye on Shin, he's likely to dissapear before your eyes.

March 18, 2009

I'm writing this short article as a sketch for a more detailed article to come. The thoughts I'm relating here are still gestating. The area of interest for me has to do with the intersection of design iteration and the scientific method. I have become fascinated with experimentation as a way of living and a way of creating value in business. I know intuitively that if you iterate on a design your design gets better. I am also starting to see the same pattern in business. Business is made up of many parallel and overlapping processes. The more optimized these processes the smoother your operation. The process of refinement is essential to both design and business. How does this refinement come about? In most cases it's a simple process of trying things or experimenting to see what works. This is why I am drawn to try and better understand the scientific method. One can not deny the tremendous effect this method has had on our humanity. What I want to know is how this method relates to the process of creativity? I have just started to look at the work of Gaston Bachelard who was both physicist and a philosopher. I need to take a deeper look at his work but at a high-level there are some compelling interconnections between creativity, science, and morality. It turns out that his thinking on scientific activity illuminates our common understanding of the idea of paradigm shifts. It is interesting how science and morality seem to flow in different streams. What if creativity, experimentation, and dialogue, are the necessary processes for better design, better business, and a better life? Maybe I'm being too optimistic? I don't think designing the right experiments is an easy or trivial thing to do. What I do sense is that keeping things simple is critical.